Shepherds of the Lord
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Book Series
Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, vol. 33
Minorities in Contact in the Medieval Mediterranean
Clara Almagro Vidal, Jessica Tearney-Pearce, Luke Yarbrough (eds)
- Pages: 388 p.
- Size:156 x 234 mm
- Illustrations:1 b/w, 7 maps b/w
- Language(s):English, Latin, French
- Publication Year:2021
- € 100,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-2-503-58793-6
- Hardback
- Available
- € 100,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-2-503-58794-3
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Winner of The Mediterranean Seminar Prize for the Best Essay Collection (2022)
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Review(s)
“Minorities in Contact in the Medieval Mediterranean is an excellent collection that forces the reader to reconsider how scholars study inter-confessional contacts and how to balance evidence from literary sources with documentary evidence of lived experiences. The volume gives voice to the power and agency of so-called ‘minorities’ across time and space in the medieval Mediterranean, and the encounters that occurred between them.” (Marci Freedman, in The Medieval Review, 21.11.28)
“This cogent collection will undoubtedly be of significant value to scholars and students of the medieval Mediterranean world and will substantially enrich syllabi concerning medieval interconfessional interactions.” (Beth C. Spacey, in Parergon, 38/2, 2021, p. 188)
“To students and scholars of this region and period the volume offers a number of informative case studies of minority encounters, not only in the physical, but also in the intellectual, commercial, legal and social sense. The accounts of Jewish–Muslim cooperation in Christian-ruled Castile and the analysis of Frankish settlement patterns in the Levant exemplify the range of methodological approaches and sources used throughout the volume. By shedding light on these various levels of minority encounters, the volume as a whole succeeds in adding some much welcomed substance to the otherwise abstract discussions on convivencia and segregation/integration.” (Enrico Boccaccini, in Al-Masāq, 01/10/2022, p. 350)
“It is to be hoped that future scholars will extend the work done by the editors of this fine volume to reflect the true range of medieval Mediterranean societies.” (Joel Pattison, in Speculum 98/2, 2023, p. 563-564)
BIO
Dr Clara Almagro Vidal (PhD, Granada) is a post-doctoral researcher at University of Évora/CIDEHUS. Jessica Tearney-Pearce (MA, Auckland and Warburg Institute) is a doctoral student in the Faculty of History/St John's College at the University of Cambridge. Luke Yarbrough (PhD, Princeton) is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. The contributors are internationally recognised scholars who specialise in the study of medieval inter-religious relations.
Summary
What is a minority? How did members of minority groups in the medieval Mediterranean world interact with contemporaries belonging to other groups? In what ways did those contacts affect their social positions and identities? The essays collected in this volume approach these questions from a variety of angles, examining polemic, social norms, economic exchange, linguistic transformations, and power dynamics.
These essays recast the concept of minority — as a mutable condition rather than a fixed group designation — and explore previously-neglected collective and individual interactions between and among minorities around the medieval Mediterranean basin. Minorities are often defined as such because they were in some way excluded from access to resources or denied participation as a consequence of a group affiliation or facet of their identity. Yet, at times their distinctiveness also lay less in their exclusion than in particular ways of relating to spheres of power, whether political or moral, and in certain dissenting conceptions of the world. Through these contributions we shed light on both the continuities that such interactions displayed across intervals of space and time, and the changes that they underwent in particular locales and historical moments.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction — CLARA ALMAGRO VIDAL, JESSICA TEARNEY-PEARCE, AND LUKE YARBROUGH
Minorities in Contact or Processes of Categorization — ANNLIESE NEF
Women at the Crossroads of Muslim/non-Muslim Encounters: Conversion and Intermarriage in the Classical Islamic Period — URIEL SIMONSOHN
Conversion and Religious Polemic between Jews and Christians in Egypt from the Fatimid through the Mamluk Periods — ALEXANDRA CUFFEL
Jewish-Christian Theological Polemic as Reflected in Judaeo-Arabic Biblical Interpretations — ZVI STAMPFER
Polemics between Religious Minorities: Christian Adversus Judaeos from the Early Abbasid Period — BARBARA ROGGEMA
Latins and Levantine Christian Minorities after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215): Jacques de Vitry’s Descriptions of Eastern Christians in the Kingdom of Jerusalem — JAN VANDEBURIE
Lamenting Jerusalem: The Papacy, the Kings’ Crusade, and the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia — TAMAR M. BOYADJIAN
'And the Lord will raise a great emir in a land’: Muslim Political Power Viewed by Coptic-Arabic Authors: A Case in the Arabic ‘Apocalypse of Pseudo Athanasius II' — JUAN PEDRO MONFERRER SALA
Keeping their Place: The Prohibition on Non-Muslim Scribes in Ahkām ahl al-dhimma — ANTONIA BOSANQUET
A Christian Official in the Mamluk State Speaks: Ibn al-Suqā‘ī on Minorities and Power — LUKE YARBROUGH
Jews in Government Functions in al-Andalus during the Taifa Period: The Case of the Banu Nagrila of Granada — ALEJANDRO GARCIA SANJUAN
More than Meets the Eye: Readings of Economic Interaction between a Muslim, a Jew and a Christian in Castile — CLARA ALMAGRO VIDAL
A Reassessment of Frankish Settlement Patterns in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: 493–583/1099–1187 — BOGDAN C. SMARANDACHE
Does Cohabitation produce Convivencia? Relationships between Jews and Muslims in Castilian Christian Towns — ANA ECHEVARRIA
Muslims and Jews in Medieval Portugal: Interaction and Negotiation (14th–15th c.) — MARIA FILOMENA LOPES DE BARROS
Conclusion — JOHN TOLAN
Index
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